The Girl in the Mirror (Sand & Fog #3) (39 page)

His features harden.

“I’m a good friend. To both of you.” He looks away. “You should have stayed in the car, Jake. Let me take care of this one. You practically started a shootout with a fucking rent-a-gun in the lobby. You’re not firing on all cylinders right now.”

The raging currents inside me turn into whitewater rapids. “I’m going in. Don’t you try to stop me.”

He shakes his head. The elevator doors open and he stands in the opening and says, “I talk. You watch. That’s it. Are we clear?”

“Fuck you,” I growl.

I follow him down the hallway.

The floor is quiet.

Almost too quiet for New York, even for 4:00 a.m.

It makes my insides jumpier.

Not that they’ve stopped since I saw the hotel bedroom.

I’m not sure which is going to hit me harder.

Finding her in there with Milo or not finding her there.

God, is she in bed with him?

And what if she’s not here? Then what?

I’ve been nothing but warring emotions since Brayden said
I see a crime scene here.

I don’t know what to think.

What to feel.

Back and forth like a ping-pong ball, angry and hurt because of her, and in the next moment terrified.

Brayden stops walking and his arms shoot out to keep me from going around him. We’re almost to 9C. Why is he stopping me this time?

I give him a push against his shoulder. “Get out of my way if you don’t want to do this. You’re not keeping me out of there. Stop trying to prevent me from finding my wife.”

“Jake—” he warns on a hushed growl, using his massive body to make me move away from the door as he reaches for his gun “The door’s open, Jake. There’s blood on the floor inside.”

I shift my gaze.

Giant pools of red on the apartment entryway tile. Oh fuck, blood everywhere. Prickles run my skin as Brayden gestures to me to flatten against the wall near the doorway. I grab my gun.

“I’m going in first. Stay here. Cover me,” he whispers.

We lock eyes, and I nod. He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, counts down, and then charges into the room. The second he’s out of my vision, time accelerates. Seconds feels like an eternity. No shots, but there’s blood. The sound of his footsteps inside the eerily quiet apartment zaps my nerves, and the feeling in my gut is unbearable.

I can’t hear him.

Fuck, why doesn’t he say something?

Call “all clear.”

He’s racing through the apartment like a charging bull, footsteps thundering, doors crashing into walls.

I peek inside. Damn it, he’s out of my line of sight. “Bray? I can’t see you, man. You OK? Is Krystal in there?”

“Stay out, Jake. You don’t want to come in.”

Oh shit.

What doesn’t he want me to see?

All that blood.

No, no, don’t let it be her.

I go through the door and it hits me like a brick wall.

“Oh fuck.”

Blood everywhere like someone butchered a cow.

Milo Bassard sitting propped on the floor against a sofa. Decapitated. His head lying between his legs.

No sign of Krystal.

Panic rockets through my veins as I anxiously sweep the rooms. “Is Krystal here? Don’t lie to me, Bray. Did they do this to her, too—”

“There’s no one here except him in the apartment.”

Open door, check.

Open door, check.

Nothing.

Over and over again until I’m back in the living room with Brayden. “I don’t see her. Oh fuck. Jesus Christ, Brayden. Where is she?”

I lean forward, hands on my thighs, fighting against the vomit erupting upward and the crushing weight of what I’m seeing and knowing something has happened to Krystal.

I stare at Brayden. “She’s not here. Where do you think she is?”

“I don’t know. I’m just glad she’s not here.” Brayden’s glazed eyes fix on Milo. “This is as bad as the shit we used to find in the desert. We’re in fucking Manhattan. How could this happen here? What kind of people could do this? What the fuck is going on, Jake?”

Details from the background checks I had Jared run flash in my head. The argument I heard between Milo Bassard and Alberto Ramos. My concerns weren’t nothing. My instincts were right, and the fucking FBI made me sound like a paranoid alarmist.

I never warned Krystal. I knew better in my gut, and worse, we stayed here when I knew we shouldn’t. The pieces lock in my head in gruesome clarity of exactly what kind of people could do this.

Alberto Ramos and his cartel.

This wasn’t a random murder.

Carving up Milo Bassard is a message.

A gruesome message.

Oh God, what have they done to Krystal?

Where is my wife?

Brayden takes out his cell, racing through the room as he snaps pictures, before sending them and placing a call to Jared. “Did you get the photos? I don’t know what the fuck is happening here. We haven’t found Krystal yet. What do you want us to do? Continue to hole up until you guys get here or do you want me to contact the Feds?”

“Don’t call the authorities. Call no one. Touch nothing,” Jared says over the speakerphone. “Stay put. We’ll be there in four hours. Keep everyone out of the apartment.”

My eyes lock on an object.

“Brayden, there’s a phone sticking out of his mouth.”

“Don’t touch it,” Graham Carson yells from the cell speaker.

“Leave it there, Jake,” Brayden orders. “Everything stays how it is until the team gets here.”

He turns his back on me, staring down at the floor, tugging on his hair as he speaks rapidly to Jared in a soft voice I can’t hear.

I’m frozen and shaking.

Dread and fear are like a cyclone inside me.

Worse than any feeling I’ve ever known.

That cellphone.

Shoved between his teeth.

The answer to what happened to Krystal is in that phone.

I know it.

I don’t want to look.

I can’t stop myself. Whatever Alberto Ramos has done to her is my fault. I need to know if she’s alive, no matter what they’ve left on that phone. I can’t wait until the team gets here. I can’t take the uncertainty a second longer.

Swallowing down the bile in my throat, I ease down in front of Milo’s body, wrap my hand in my shirttail and lift the phone out of Milo’s mouth.

A burner cell.

Covering my finger, I swipe it.

One text unread highlighted on the icon.

I open the message.

Pictures.

The bed at the hotel.

The ropes.

My wife.

Men with masks.

Swipe. More.

Swipe. Another picture.

Swipe.

I shut my lids to blot out the images, but everything in me shatters anyway. Oh baby, forgive me…

“Krystal”

White wall, white wall, dirty floor, metal fence. Where am I? How many days has it been? How do you count days if you can’t see the sun rise and set? One, two, three, four. Jacob counted days in jail to keep his sanity when he served two months for what he did for Janie. Five, six, seven, eight…

How did he count days?

Is there sunlight in jail?

There’s no sunlight in nightmares.

A gentle hand runs my brow. She speaking Spanish. I understand her. I stare at the wall, expression blank. Is it better to let her know I understand her or to continue pretending I don’t?

The women are kind. At least, I think they are. We’re all in the same dark place. Sleeping on floors. Buckets for bathrooms. Food not fit for a dog. Water from a faucet on the wall. They whisper to me in comforting tones. Tell me not to eat the food. It’s laced with something to keep us quiet and sleep. My stomach is so empty it’s painful. But I don’t eat, even when they bring something different than for the rest of the girls and try to force me to.

When I stopped eating, the world came back into focus. My mind turned on, though that’s not a good thing. It makes it real, being here and the sounds I hear around my frozen body.

The men come, but they don’t take me. I hear them raping the other girls, but after that one night at the hotel, no one has touched me.

Maybe they think I’m crazy.

I don’t speak or look or make eye contact.

I’m impassive to everything I see and hear.

Not so different than my auditions.

Commanding all parts of me: the mental, the physical, and the emotional. Revealing nothing. Absorbing the pain. Fighting through it all. Only no pleasure. There is no pleasure here. A different kind of nexus. The nexus between fear, pain, and survival.

A boot taps my back.

When I don’t respond, fingers lock in my hair, jerking my face upward. “Bonita, what did the guards of your father’s house call you? They gave you a name. What was it?”

Spanish.

I see him without looking straight at him. One of the men who raped me with Alberto Ramos in Manhattan.

Why is he asking me that?

Is it better to answer or better to lie still as though I don’t understand him?

I stare at the wall.

Five, six, seven, eight.

He jerks my hair again.

Inside my head I scream.

My body stays lifeless.

He starts to curse, and then releases me as I drop back onto the filthy mattress.

Footsteps.

Leaving.

Gate opening and lock snapping.

One, two, three, four…

Silence.

The woman beside me moves close. Lightly she brushes the hair from my face. “He will be back. Answer him. It is good to understand them when it helps you. Maybe it means they are talking to your people, arranging the ransom. Maybe the question means your family wants to know if you are still living. They will not pay if they think you are dead. Answer him. It will get you home, chica.”

Chica—it makes me think of Lourdes and home.

My gaze moves around the room.

The two other women on the far side.

Will Alberto let me go home?

What if I answer and they kill me?

Flashing images of the things done to me rise in my head. I bury my face in the pillow. It doesn’t matter anymore if they kill me.

I count the walls in my head.

Footsteps.

Hands jerk me from the floor and I am turned to face Alberto Ramos. “I know you understand, Ángel. I know you are not loco either.” His fingers run the line of my cheek, down my jaw, and brush my neck. It takes everything I have not to flinch. “These other girls, they have no one. This is their life now. But you can get out of here, Krystal. Your father will pay for you. But he will not pay if you don’t answer me. What is the name the security company at your father’s house gave to you? The code name the men used for you?”

The name.

I say it in my head.

No sound comes from my lips.

Why am I silent?

I don’t care if they kill me.

I just want this to end.

“Diva…” My voice falters in my parched throat. “They call me Diva Two. All of them except my husband.”

I’m thrown back to my place on the floor.

“Jacob”

Five days. In a fog, I wander through the situation room. It’s like the command center in a war zone. Men—no, mercenaries—handpicked from Jared’s eclectic employee list, on standby with their fucking high-powered weapons. Piles of intel. Maps. Charts. Documents marked classified thanks to Graham’s contacts at the CIA, FBI, DEA, and NSA. Everything every agency has on the Ramos Cartel. Satellite images, digital everything.

This is state-of-the-art go-to-war shit.

As good, if not better, than the military, since I’m pretty sure I’m in a place that doesn’t exist according to the government.

Why can’t they find her?

Why hasn’t Alberto Ramos made any demands yet?

They left that fucking phone in Milo’s mouth so we’d find it and they’d have a direct line to contact us.

It makes no sense that they haven’t used it, and my thoughts are an unending stream of heart-ripping fears.

Did they kill her?

Is that why there’s silence?

My eyes burn.

Crud, I’m crying again.

I swipe at the streams on my face.

Get it together, Jake.

Crying isn’t going to help her, and you’ve been pretty fucking useless thus far.

I’ve been a useless piece of shit since I got that call from Brayden on Tuesday asking me if Krystal was home at the loft.

All those insane thoughts about my wife after the hotel. What the fuck’s wrong with me?

Then getting in Brayden’s way as he tried to take charge of shit when we found Milo Bassard dead. Going off like a misfired missile on Jared when the men finally got to New York, when I’m the one to blame for Krystal being missing.

If I hadn’t married her, I’d have still been only her bodyguard and would’ve told her everything I suspected about NBBC. She’d be home safe now if I hadn’t fucked up because I love her. I didn’t want to hurt her.

Every thirty minutes there’s a situation update and never any news. My gaze locks on the cluster huddled over the conference table: Jared, Graham, Alan, Jamal, Dillon, and the skirt from the CIA, Jena Garret.

She’s the first official spook I’ve ever met. A close personal friend of Graham Carson. She’s off the books to be here, wherever the hell here is. Probably a black-ops compound, off the books as well. On the border outside El Paso. That’s all they told me in the plane here, and didn’t follow up with details of why we hotfooted it here from Manhattan.

I stay on the far side of the room, but my gaze is locked on the table. Jena is gesturing, finger moving in a line, then tapping. Heated discussion with Graham. Angry shake of her head. The look on Dillon’s face is not good. Jena runs her finger and taps the map again.

Have they found Krystal?

Is that what this is?

Not asking; don’t want the ravaging disappointment again. I feel a heavy pressure of eyes. Alan. He’s on his cell, talking quickly to someone. Impassive face. Controlled demeanor. Iron. I now know where Krystal gets her internal strength. But I don’t know how he doesn’t break in this circumstance.

He’s watching me like he wants me to come over. I can’t do it. It’s hard enough looking at Alan, knowing he must blame me for this, though he’ll never say it. He’s that kind of man.